Houston Transplant Program Halts: Families of Deceased Patients Demand Accountability

DALLAS (AP)— Several relatives of patients who died while waiting for a new liver asked Wednesday if their loved ones were wrongly refused a transplant by a Houston doctor suspected of manipulating the queue to make certain patients ineligible for a new organ.

Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center officials have announced that they are investigating after discovering that a clinician made “inappropriate changes” to the national database for persons waiting for liver transplants. Earlier last month, the hospital discontinued its liver and kidney programs.

Susie Garcia’s son, Richard Mostacci, died in February 2023 after being told he was too unwell to receive a transplant. He was 43. “We saw him slipping away, and there was nothing we could do, so we trusted the doctors,” Garcia stated at a press briefing.

She is one of three patients’ family members who hired attorneys from a Houston law firm to seek a temporary restraining order to prohibit Dr. Steve Bynon from deleting or destroying evidence. Attorney Tommy Hastings stated that several meetings with Bynon had raised “concerns about maybe some personal animosities and that he may have taken it out on patients.”

“Again, we’re very early in this investigation,” Hastings added.

Hermann-Memorial’s statement did not name the doctor, but the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, or UTHealth Houston, published a statement defending Bynon, calling him “an exceptionally talented and caring physician” with “among the best survival rates in the nation.”

Bynon is a UTHealth Houston employee under contract with Memorial Hermann. He did not respond to an email question on Wednesday.

The hospital claims that the unlawful changes were only made to the liver transplant program, but because he oversaw both the liver and kidney transplant programs, they were inactivated simultaneously.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has also announced an investigation, stating that it is “working across the department to address this matter.”

On Wednesday, neither Hermann Memorial, UTHealth, nor HHS provided any more comments.

Meanwhile, a lady representing a separate law firm filed a lawsuit in Harris County this week against Memorial Hermann and UTHealth, claiming negligence in the death of her husband, John Montgomery, who died in May 2023 at the age of 66 while on the waiting for a liver transplant. According to the lawsuit, Montgomery was informed he wasn’t sick enough, then too sick, before being removed from the list.

The fatality rate for those waiting for liver transplants at Memorial Hermann has been higher than predicted in recent years, according to publicly accessible data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, which assesses organ transplant programs in the United States. The group discovered that 19 people died in the queue between July 2021 and June 2023, whereas models expected 14 fatalities.

While the hospital’s waiting mortality rate of 28% was higher than expected, “there were many liver programs with more extreme outcomes during the same period,” according to Jon Snyder, the registry’s director, via email.

He stated that the hospital’s first-year success rates for the 56 adults who got transplants from July 2020 to December 2022 were 35% higher than expected based on national data.